Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as often as billionaires are fleeing California these days 👋
In today’s edition:
💡 A “lit” idea for a new social network
🛠 How to buy a "starter" business (instead of building one)
🔋 Turning melted crayons into a $500M exit + more
🔍 OpenAI, Pickle, Gmail addresses + more
🍻 Bringing endless scrolling to a bigger screen
Let’s goooo 🚀
💸 $1,000 Giveaway: We’re teaming up with Squarespace to give away $1,000 to one of our readers who take action this week. To enter all you have to do is:
Check out Squarespace
Build a one-page website on Squarespace (could be your personal website, a landing page, anything to move you forward) this week
Reply to this email (or any email this week) with what you’ve built
More details later in the email. Good luck!
📖 Literary Social Network
In the citegeist
Available Domain: BookSoc.com
The Problem: Dan Go is a fitness influencer with millions of followers across social media. But as it turns out Dan is also pretty good at coming up with business ideas. He recently put a callout for someone to build an app that that scrolls like social media where the users are books you’ve read on kindle and the posts are the parts you’ve highlighted. Cool idea, Dan. Taking inspiration from him, we think there’s a super cool opportunity to build something here. This is what we’re thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A beautifully designed social network where users scroll through aesthetically curated literary quotes and book passages, replacing viral videos with viral prose.
🛠️ Product:
Users sign up and select their favorite genres and authors to personalize their feeds.
The main feed displays quotes in gorgeous typography, with each post showing the quote, book title and author. The posts come from books themselves and user can save posts or click in to get more details about the book itself on the book’s profile. There’s also a separate feed where users posts quotes from books that they want to share, tagging the book itself.
Discovery features include author spotlight pages, reading challenges that gamify posting quotes from specific books or time periods, and a "Serendipity" button that serves random literary gems from outside your usual preferences. Verified author accounts can post exclusive content and interact directly with readers too
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: Earn affiliate revenue from linking off to the full books for users to buy
⭐ End Goal: Sell to Amazon/Audible (6-8x revenue multiple) as a complement to Kindle's ecosystem, or to Goodreads' parent company as a modern replacement for their aging platform.
Rate this idea
🔚 Final Call for the $1,000 Challenge
This is it…the last chance.
We're teaming up with Squarespace to give away $1,000 to someone who proves they're actually building, not just browsing.
The Challenge:
Create a one-page website on Squarespace.
Your new venture, your creative work, your personal brand - just make it exist.
Reply to this email (or another email this week) with the live link.
The best wins $1,000. Submit by Midnight on Sunday PT.
Check out Squarespace today and use code HALFBAKED10 to get 10% off any plan!
🛒 How to Buy a "Starter" Business (Instead of Building One)
The Context: Sometimes the best way to start a startup is to skip the "Zero to One" phase by buying a product that needs a little TLC. How? Well thousands of developers build cool tools, get bored, and abandon them. These "zombie" projects often have traffic and users but no owner, so you can buy them for cheap and focus purely on growing them. Here’s how.
Step-by-step:
Go to sites like Acquire.com or Flippa and look for projects with: Low revenue (<$500/mo), some history (>1 year old), and a description like "No time to maintain." Ask yourself: "Could I double this business just by running ads?". Place bids on projects you’re interested in buying.
If you can’t find anything listed that you like, search GitHub for "maintained: no" or Reddit for "shutting down my project" to find other projects you might want to buy.
If you find a project you’re interested in, reach out to the developer with a message like: "Hey, I love this tool. I see you aren't working on it much. Would you be open to selling it so I can keep it alive?" You can often pick up codebases for a few thousand dollars (or less).
Worth exploring!
🤖 Start learning AI in 2026
AI won't take over the world. People who know how to use AI will.
Join 1M+ top performers learning AI tools & skills in just 3 minutes a day.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 The Money Shot: This founder melted down some crayons and turned it into a $500M exit. Here’s how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: Greg Brockman (OpenAI co-founder) believes there will be two big themes in AI in 2026.
💬 Prompt Drop: Here are 10 photo editing prompts to get amazing results from Gemini/Nano Banana.
🆓 Free Resource: Nvidia offer a ton of courses (some free) in different areas of AI. Who knew?
💵 Deal of the Day: Get Notion’s Business plan free for up to 6 months (save $12,000) with Notion for Startups.
🔍 Founder Finds
❓ OpenAI's mysterious ChatGPT hardware device is starting to take shape, and the leaks about it are coming thick and fast.
👓 Pickle just launched their AR smart glasses, the Pickle 1 (either a genius or a terrible name, can’t decide). Regardless, they look slick.
📧 Google is finally allowing us to change our gmail addresses. About damn time…
🔮 The Information has made some bold AI predictions for 2026. Summary of their predictions here.
📖 Dwarkesh and Philip Trammell just wrote a post called Capital in the 22nd Century explaining how AI breaks the economy as we know it. Scarier than any horror story you’ll read…
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Vertical TV
Stuck watching short-form videos on your tiny phone screen? Wish you could doomscroll with the cinematic grandeur it truly deserves?
Meet ReelScreen™ - the world's first rotating TV that flips vertically for your short-form content addiction. Finally, you can give your doomscrolling the canvas it deserves.
ReelScreen™ - it’s the reel deal.
Vote
👋 That’s All Folks!
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